From the Earth to the Stars
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: AU. It was blank. Devoid. It was fearful. The unknown, the uncomprehended. It was powerful. Bending to the slightest change of my will. It was intoxicating…and it was devouring my very soul. And I could do nothing save watch it happen.


**A/N:** Another chapter sitting around on my harddrive…and from the looks of things, from Feb last year.

The title comes from a latin quote: non est ad astra mollis e terris via - There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. This first chapter doesn't have a lot of action in it, but it'll change as the story progresses…well, that's the idea anyway.

The title of this first chapter comes from, word for word, someone who has a fanfiction account on this site. The title just seemed to suit. So Arigato for letting me borrow your name. :) And sorry for taking so long to post.

The first chapter of a 1st person fic like this one always seems to come out less actiony and more explanatory. I feel it gets you into the narrator's shoes by the time the actual events start, and you can see where their biases are imprinting on the retelling and perception of events. I'm rereading Alyzon Whitestarr right now (when I wrote this I mean) and it pretty much starts off the same way. If I remember correctly, The School Project started off the same way too. (A/N: this was when I wrote the chapter in Feb 2012).

Australia gets really cool eclipses. Except when you have a phobia of them and are stuck in the bus the entire time… Anyway, this chapter took place on the night of December 10, 2011 where a lunar eclipse was visible over Japan and East Asia, and also coincidently, Australia. It's a total eclipse, but not a massive one. Because of that, I've changed the twins' birthdate to 1996. The once-in-a-lifetime eclipse was on August 17 1999.

Enjoy, and tell me what you think. Pwease? I need for love for my multi-chaptered fics…sometimes it feels people are reluctant to read them…

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**From the Earth to the Stars  
Chapter 1 – Darkness Within Us**

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_"Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash." - Louis Aragon_

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Darkness. It really is a concept that's…well, phenomenal. A conundrum if you will. Some see the surface and describe it as the antithesis of light, all that is bad and evil in the world. As if the two were discrete concepts, rigorously defined. Light: "the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible; electromagnetic radiation from about 390 to 740 nm in wavelength." Darkness: "the partial or total absence of light; night." That is what the dictionary says. It does the same thing it does with any other word. A closet definition really; a solid closed three-dimensional shape is restricted to the space allocated to it. And a few lines in a pocket-sized book isn't nearly enough to describe them. We normally take it at face value though…except the few conundrums that nag us and invite is to explore deeper and question.

The other opinion, slightly less common, is that the only absolute form of knowledge in existence is that nothing is absolute. Many a person have rewritten that law to allow for concepts such as life and death; there are people who truly believe that the time of death, _our_ death, is recorded the moment cells amass into a living viable being…or what scientists call an embryo. It's a fully word really. Embryo: "an unborn human baby, esp. in the first eight weeks from conception, after implantation but before all the organs are developed." Physically, it's just a name of a bunch of cells, the so-called building blocks of life, at a specific point in time. There are a multitude of other stages: egg, sperm, zygote, fetus…and then the stages of human "life". Life starts as birth and ends at the touch of death. But I don't believe that. Death should only touch a person once if that were true. I've touched it more times than I'd like to count, and yet I'm still breathing. Still moving. Still living.

That's another conundrum. How do you define life and death? As concepts I mean. Beyond the penned in dictionary definitions. Is life once you've taken your first breath of air in this world, or when the cells that make up your body congregate into a form identifiable as a human embryo? Or is it when the soul enters that body? All of them are plausible, all of them believed. But me? I think a little differently. Life to me is when you're trying to do something. Death is when you've either succeeded, failed or given up.

But if you ask me to define success or failure, I couldn't. Or rather, I wouldn't. Some prefer to think of it as a continuum. That's close, but even then I feel it's missing the mark. A circle is what I believe. The circle of life…it even has a certain ring to it. Literally as well as figuratively. Sometimes they seem like one and the same thing. The point where the beginning is indistinguishable from the end. I guess that's where the idiom "living death" comes from.

But that's life and death. The ultimate question many spend their entire lives trying to answer, and they all either fail or take their secrets to the grave with them. Perhaps there's a third option. But if there is, I've never come across it. Then again, I'm not exactly looking for an answer. Or maybe I am, on some subconscious level. A level I'm afraid to admit, even to myself.

Life isn't something I particularly want. It's just something I have, or I presume I have rather. It's the belief that matters in the end I guess. Some believe that living is about feeling happy. _Being_ happy. If that's the case, I've died too many times to be able to count. I died on the day I was born. When I cried. So did everyone.

And now, sitting on the rooftop and hugging my knees while staring out into a sky in which no moon existed and no star escaped their prison to illuminate, leaving twelve stories below me the darkness of an empty and cold apartment, I might have died again.

That sounds rather depressing when I reflect on it, provided one didn't think to tweak the flap, or so to say, read between the lines. If you're not happy, it doesn't mean you're sad. It just means you're not happy. And then there's the problem: define "happy". It's always different, depending on who's doing the defining.

Just like the concepts of light and darkness. On a scale. I've not met a person yet who would not describe the sky right now as dark…or would rather disagree at describing the sky right know as dark.

Darkness and I, we have a bit of a love-hate relationship. Even from a young age, it's always fascinated me. The night is dark. Without light, let that be the moon reflecting the sun's rays unobscured by clouds in the sky or the artificial light bulbs turned on and off by the flick of a switch, what else is there to do but think without obstruction or sleep? If the light never turned dark, if the sun never set beyond the horizon, what was there to coax our bodies to rest and recoup for a new day. What would there be to define one for another? And even for those who were forced to work all hours of the night, the bed seemed all the more enticing when a stage-light didn't shine on it.

It was strange. I never could sleep with a night-light, but my sleep was still riddled with demons that only seemed to show their face when there was nothing to illuminate them. Cowards, demons were. Or perhaps we are the ones who make them cowards. Our fear personified…isn't that what demons are? In a sense?

Most things are easy to accept at face-value. Only philosophers and philosophy students spend hours on end thinking about why a pen is called a pen. But there are other puzzles that occupy substantial space in even the most primitive mind. One of those is death…and life. Another is darkness…and light.

I suppose it's a bit of an obsession, but having already completed my homework for the weekend, there was little else to do while waiting for the short winter days to turn into nights and then revert back to day again but to think. I could sleep, but I'd have to wake up again soon anyway because my mother is still at work.

In any case, I love watching the blank black stretch across the sky like a canvas, or a cloak. It's not a pure black; the street lights glow below by the roads weaving around blocks, and the inhabitants of some apartments are bustling around with their curtains open and the artificial light from their overheads streaming through. On the roof though, the only light is that which rises from the ground. The darkness should stream down from the sky, but alas it remains an infallible mystery still.

I didn't bring my sketchbook tonight; it's too cold. It's rather hard to draw when hands are huddled beneath the flesh under the knee-caps, borrowing through the layers of clothing I could afford myself to wear. I didn't think another attempt at capturing the night sky as it was would yield any more results than already had. Every drawing I'd managed had paled n insignificance to the reality I stared at.

I really loved the sky. Even when you could see nothing, it was beautiful.

Okay, that wasn't strictly true. People hold stock to the claim that you need a light to be able to see. There was no light I could see in the sky. I let my knees go for a moment to lie flat on my back. Like that, the lights below me became invisible. Became nothing.

I could still see the sky. And all the secrets it held, far beyond my reach. How it could taunt is so…like right now. How it kept the moon away and the stars covered in darkness.

There. The word darkness shows up again.

If anything can define darkness, I think this is it. The sky, stripped of all sources we call light. Stretching far and wide, enveloping the entire world and amassing in more places besides. Somewhere up there were entire universes unexplored some even unimagined. Who knew…maybe there was even a heaven up there too.

That's why I both love and hate it really. Because no matter how hard I try, I'm no closer to understanding it. And just like any other human, to the rest of the universe a tiny ant trying to lift more than its own weight while running from the inevitable stomp of a foot belonging to a being lager and more magnificent than our own species, I fear what I cannot understand.

But it's still so enthralling. Mum calls it an obsession. Sometimes I'm inclined to agree, but it doesn't seem like a bad thing. It keeps me occupied for one…sometimes a little too occupied I think wryly, blowing on my hands. Not this time though. I can feel the cold biting my fingers and toes. If I don't go so soak them now in some warm water, they'll go all read and puffy and sore in a few days. And when the swelling goes down, the then purple skin will start cracking and peeling. I don't know why people say skin goes _blue_ when one has frostbite. Sometimes when it's bad, my fingers go black. But never blue.

Running my hands under the tap made them go red. The other sort of red though. It was funny I thought, comparing this red to the red they had been before the hot water warmed them. Of course, the heat would soon fade, but it was quite a nice feeling as the heat vapour rose and got trapped in the towel, bouncing back and retaining much warmth. It was far more practical to leave them in the towel; not all of it was wet. Just as the entire expanse of the sky couldn't possibly be black, even if the sun got covered by the moon in a total eclipse.

Running my hands under the tap made them go red. The other sort of red though. It was funny I thought, comparing this red to the red they had been before the hot water warmed them. Of course, the heat would soon fade, but it was quite a nice feeling as the heat vapour rose and got trapped in the towel, bouncing back and retaining much warmth. It was far more practical to leave them in the towel; not all of it was wet. Just as the entire expanse of the sky couldn't possibly be black, even if the sun got covered by the moon in a total eclipse.

Eclipses were another funny thing. They weren't all that rare. I've seen at least three partial ones in my lifetime, and there was a total eclipse some time in 1999. I forgot the exact time, but so many people had gathered on the hill in the park to watch it in awe. All of them had been wearing sunglasses or carrying a screen of some sort with them. Mum had tied her scarf around my eyes; we didn't have screens like that, and she had crouched down to my height and peeked through the loose end. For a moment I thought we were just going to see a smiley face cover the sun or something like that; I was three at the time. But when the light was almost completely blotted out, I was…well, it's hard to describe what I was. I was terrified for one thing. It was like someone had covered the entire earth in a blanket of darkness, save for the little outline that was all that we could see of the sun. But I was also fascinated. After all, I'd grown up seeing the sun at one end of the sky in the morning and dipping over the other end in the afternoon. I'd seen the much tinier moon shifting through his phases, looking at what I used to call smiley and frowny faces. At that age I had trouble distinguishing the two words. They sounded so similar. But that tiny moon had drowned out the huge sun. I remember that pretty clearly for a three year old. It's the time when memories start becoming permanent, but the rest of my third year is faded, blotted out.

The story of Icarus had always been one of my favourites, even when I couldn't understand why someone would want to fly with wings made out of candle wax, or even how the wax stuck to skin. The power went out a lot, so I wasn't exactly unfamiliar with candles. But the wax of Icarus' wings had melted when he got too close to the sun and he fell into the sea and drowned. He had felt too free, been too curious, and that had been the end of him. But the moon which was supposed to be simply a smaller and far less significant reflection of the sun was able to blot out its power. The same one that had sent the cat to the earth for being too curious…for in the end, that is what our bones and flesh become. When I had watched the sun being blotted out, I half expected it to get furious, swell to double its size, and knock the moon to the earth. For a split second I thought it was going to crash down on us all. I really did. I even scrambled into Mum's arms, whimpering, my three year old mind still at the stage where it thought mothers could protect their children from anything.

The clouds were drifting, and the moon was starting to peek out. Now that warmth was trilling through my body, I was starting to get sleepy. But Mum wasn't home still, and I wasn't about to leave the door unlocked and go to sleep. The night kept a lot of things hidden, and opened the doors to lots of different sorts of…things. Sometimes it's such an ugly word.

It was an unfortunate perception, but it _was_ true. Robberies, murders…they more often happened under the cloak of darkness, because then there was no sun to shove them back down, do spotlight to expose them. And on nights when the moon was clouded too…

That made me looked out the window, coaxing the curtains away from the frosted glass before rubbing the flakes away with a towel. The moon was half-red. It was another lunar eclipse. An omen some said, having an eclipse so close to winter solstice. It wasn't _that_ close though; last year it had practically been on the night. Still, I shivered a little before closing the curtains again. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the temperature dropped. It might have. There wasn't a thermometer placed conveniently nearby but it was winter after all. In a day or so it was going to start snowing, and school would finish for the term. In another couple of weeks, it would be Christmas, and then New Years.

We weren't Christian, but it was a universal holiday and we always did something together. Me, Mum and Grandma. When I was five and Grandma had first been in the hospital, Mum and I had spent the day making a cake that was almost as big as me. That was mostly my fault though. I added too much self-raising flour. Luckily, my cooking skills have improved, but not so much my Grandmother's health. She still alternated between being rather peppy and being sick. When she was feeling well though, nothing could get her to slow down. Mum says she's doomed to work herself to death. Grandma says Mum is too. I'm inclined to agree with both of them. We're not very well off, all things considered, but we get by…mostly. A lot of the time we're eating instant ramen from the microwave instead of the conventional spread of breakfast. It doesn't taste bad or anything, but every now and then Mum would look over the table at me. When she was home of course. It's less of that of late. The entire world seems to be having money troubles. Literally.

Of course, it's a little different when it comes to a fifteen year old's view on the situation. Instead of buying books, I can borrow them from the library. Instead of being taxied around, I can take the bus or the train. Instead of taking one of those, I can walk, and the more I walk, the farther I can get. The more I busy myself in things like thinking, the less I need to concern myself with concrete things. I guess that's mainly the reason I don't get along with anyone in my class, or my year level.

I think every relationship, even those with inanimate things, or things we believe to be inanimate, needs first understanding. And light and darkness are both things we are eternally surrounded by, but darkness more than light I think. After all, when the moon blotted out the light, there was nothing left save darkness. But even when the sun shines there is darkness…and a substantial amount of it too. Even if we do define darkness by its antonym of light, it is a lot vaster. After all, light is trapped in its definition. Darkness' has a loophole. The only limitation is that it is everything light is not.

We humans have a lot of darkness within us at all. We could even _be_ a part of darkness, if anyone cared to admit it. After all, light is described as all that is good and pure. Maybe babies are pure. But as soon as we start to think and act, we've done too much to ever return to that again.

If darkness was evil, heaven would be a very dark place.


End file.
